Wow! Red Hat’s buying Inktank for its Ceph storage smarts

Interesting: Red Hat is buying Inktank, the company behind the popular Ceph open-source distributed storage technology, for about $175 million in cash.

In its press release, Red Hat positioned the acquisition as complementary to its Gluster distributed storage technology and said the combination will boost Red Hat’s presence in software-defined storage. Oh, and it will give big customers an option aside from proprietary solutions from EMC. Red Hat bought Gluster and its scale-out storage expertise two years ago.

Here’s how Red Hat differentiates between the two storage technologies in its FAQ. Both rely on commodity servers and the underlying XFS file system. But, according to the FAQ:

“Inktank has a more mature block interface and OpenStack integration, while Gluster has a more mature file system interface and traditional web storage integration. Therefore, the two complement each other very well and we believe the combination is a very attractive alternative to traditional proprietary storage.”

Red Hat, which leads the leagues in enterprise Linux, is trying to replicate that success in OpenStack cloud — and there Ceph is a very important component. Many OpenStack fans prefer Ceph to OpenStack’s own Swift storage because it provides both block storage and file storage capabilities, while Swift focuses on object storage.

I guess the news shouldn’t be a total surprise, given that Inktank added Red Hat support to Ceph a year ago. Still, it may unsettle some OpenStack players who view Red Hat as a threat and would like to see its power over the emerging framework limited. This will likely be the a hot topic at the OpenStack Summit which kicks off May 12 in Atlanta.

Red Hat EVP Brian Stevens and Inktank founder Sage Weil will speak more about the deal later on Wednesday. And we’ll be sure to ask Stevens about Red Hat’s plans for Ceph during his appearance at Gigaom Structure in June.

This story was updated with additional quotes and context about how Ceph and Gluster differ from Red Hat documents.